A book retailer may improve the quality of its product offerings by independently reviewing books and informing publishers of identified errors. Spelling errors are among the more common types of errors identified and reported to publishers. With recent increases in independent publishers and even self-published electronic books (eBooks), it has become impracticable for publications to be subjected uniformly to human review prior to being distributed to end consumers. Accordingly, automatic linguistic checking systems may be used to identify and flag spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors within a document prior to publication.
Although eliminating inadvertent linguistic errors is generally a desirable goal, many authors intentionally misspell words, or include other linguistic deviations, for a variety of reasons such as, for example, to exhibit a particular character's accent in a dialogue or to onomatopoetically spell out a natural sound. Thus, informing publishers of every linguistic deviation (e.g. spelling or grammar deviations) identified in a document may over-inclusively return even intentional linguistic deviations, e.g. words intentionally spelled incorrectly or fictitious words that exist only in the publication. Unnecessarily prompting a publisher to review intentional linguistic deviations may detract from the publisher's ability to adequately address inadvertent linguistic errors that are actually deserving of correction or, worse yet, may frustrate the publisher into disregarding the notifications altogether.
Although resources exist to perform linguistics checking in a document, such as an automatic spell checking system integrated into word processing software, these resources lack the ability to determine whether an author has intentionally misspelled words.